Delete comment from: Elements Of Power
The Canadian debate on F-35 has been influenced by at least 3 different perspectives:
1) There are a lot of people in Canada who don't see any reason to spend money on a fighter aircraft. The country's political orientation has swung right over the past couple of decades, but there are still a lot of people who think the Canadian Armed Forces are supposed to be social workers with guns.
2) Boeing has been lobbying heavily in favor of the Super Hornet. Hyper-competitive sales guys love tearing into the competition. Unfortunately, they risk feeding issue 1).
3) There's still a fixation with industrial offsets in some parts of the bureaucracy, and definitely in parts of the Canadian aerospace industry that aren't currently getting F-35 work. You'd think that people would've figured out that "offsets" are really just a way of paying for political cover, but no. ("Sure, we paid $20 million more per aircraft, but some of that work stayed in Canada!" - never mind that SOMEBODY paid an extra $20 million...) The F-35 industrial participation program and lack of a "competition" bugs the bureaucrats.
Mar 5, 2014, 2:11:34 PM
Posted to The Joint Strike Fighter/F-35 Program: A Canadian Technology Policy Perspective?